How to use AWS Cost Management to cut cloud expenses?
Managing AWS costs is essential for keeping cloud expenses in check. AWS Cost Management tools help you track spending and optimise usage efficiently. This article will guide you through the tools and strategies to reduce your AWS costs.
Key takeaways on AWS Cost Management
- AWS Cost Management tools provide companies with insights into their cloud spending, enabling them to track expenses, optimise usage, and forecast future costs effectively.
- Key tools like AWS Cost Explorer, Budgets, and Anomaly Detection enhance visibility and accountability in cloud expenditures, helping companies avoid overspending and manage resources efficiently.
- Proactive cost management through AWS tools helps businesses set budgets, receive alerts, and make informed decisions to maximise their cloud investment while minimising unnecessary expenses.
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What is AWS Cost Management?
AWS Cost Management is a suite of tools designed to help businesses track their spending and optimise costs effectively.
The tools provide visibility into usage and costs, insights into spending patterns, and the ability to forecast future expenses, making them indispensable for any organisation leveraging AWS.
One of the primary goals of AWS Cost Management is to minimise the total cost of ownership in the cloud. This involves identifying cost sources, minimising unexpected expenses, and supporting planning for variable usage.
Maintaining cloud costs can be challenging due to complexity, lack of visibility, and accountability issues.
Proactive approach to cost management not only helps in controlling expenses but also ensures that businesses can make informed, strategic decisions about how to control cloud costs and implement effective savings plans.
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- Cloud Cost Optimisation services – save as much as 70% on your cloud infrastructure!
How does AWS Cost Management help reduce cloud expenses?
AWS Cost Management tools offer transparency in resource usage, helping businesses avoid overspending and optimise their cloud infrastructure.
These tools provide real-time cost tracking, budgeting, forecasting, and optimisation recommendations, enabling businesses to identify unnecessary expenses and set spending limits.
Knowing which services drive costs and which accounts have the highest expenditures helps identify cost optimisation opportunities.
Another critical aspect of AWS Cost Management is its support for multiple AWS accounts and multi-cloud environments.
This feature benefits large organisations with complex cloud infrastructures by providing a consolidated view of cloud spending. The tools also facilitate cost allocation strategies, attributing costs to specific projects or departments, thereby improving accountability and financial oversight.
Benefits of AWS Cloud financial management
One of the most significant benefits of AWS Cost Management tools is the transparency they provide.
Enhanced visibility into resource usage and spending patterns allows businesses to track cloud costs more effectively and avoid overspending. This is critical to making better decisions and delivering maximum value.
Another key advantage of AWS Cost Management tools is the proactive management of expenses.
Custom budgets and alerts enable teams to manage spending proactively and react quickly to any anomaly. AWS Budgets allows setting budget thresholds to monitor both costs and resources, providing an added layer of financial control.
Identifying cost-saving opportunities is crucial for maintaining budget constraints in AWS environments.
Regular analysis of resource usage highlights underutilised services and suggests optimisations. Custom budgets and alerts enable proactive expense management, ensuring any potential cost overruns are addressed promptly.
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What AWS Cost Management tools should you be using?
The AWS Billing and Cost Management Console serves as the primary interface for accessing various AWS Cost Management tools.
It offers a comprehensive dashboard summarising AWS spending and cost reports. These tools help organisations identify cost optimisation opportunities by analysing usage trends and informing resource allocation decisions, including consolidated billing.
The following subsections cover specific AWS Cost Management tools:
- AWS Cost Explorer
- AWS Budgets
- AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
- AWS Compute Optimizer
- AWS Trusted Advisor
- AWS Auto Scaling
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer provides detailed visualisations of costs and usage, helping users understand their spending patterns.
It allows filtering and grouping of cost categories data, offering insights into which services and accounts drive costs. Users can create customised reports in AWS Cost Explorer to analyse cost trends over time.
The tool includes historical data for up to 12 months, aiding in understanding and forecasting trends. These insights help businesses predict budget needs and plan for future expenses more accurately.
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AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets allows setting custom budgets to track spending in real-time. Users can create specific budgets based on services or cost allocation tags, enabling detailed tracking of financial performance.
AWS Budgets sends automatic alerts when spending exceeds defined thresholds, prompting users to take necessary actions. This approach enhances financial oversight and helps teams manage spending more effectively, preventing cost overruns.
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is a free tool that uses machine learning to monitor AWS spending patterns.
It identifies unusual spending patterns and alerts users if unanticipated spikes in usage occur. This ensures businesses can quickly respond to any unusual spending behavior and take corrective actions.
The tool sends automated alerts when it identifies unexpected changes in spending, helping users stay on top of their cloud expenses.
Find out more about Cloud Governance:
- The ultimate guide to Cloud Cost Governance for businesses
- How to build and implement a cloud governance framework?
- Cloud Governance Services – work with Future Processing!
AWS Compute Optimizer
AWS Compute Optimizer is a machine learning-powered service that helps businesses analyse and optimise their AWS compute resources for better performance and cost efficiency.
It provides recommendations for right-sizing EC2 instances, Auto Scaling groups, EBS volumes, and Lambda functions, ensuring businesses are not over-provisioning or underutilising cloud resources.
AWS Compute Optimizer analyses historical usage patterns to suggest more suitable instance types, pricing models, and auto-scaling configurations.
These AI-driven insights and automated recommendations are essential for organisations implementing AWS Cost Management and FinOps best practices, helping maximise efficiency.
AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Trusted Advisor is a cloud optimisation tool providing real-time recommendations to help businesses improve security, performance, cost efficiency, fault tolerance, and service limits within their AWS environment.
It continuously analyses an organisation’s AWS infrastructure, identifying potential issues or areas for improvement across five key categories.
AWS Trusted Advisor is especially useful for cost management, cloud security compliance, and optimising resources. Basic checks are available to all AWS users, while full access to advanced recommendations requires a Business or Enterprise Support Plan.
AWS Auto Scaling
AWS Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the number of compute resources based on real-time demand.
It helps businesses optimise performance, maintain availability, and control costs by ensuring they have the right amount of capacity to handle traffic fluctuations efficiently.
Key features of AWS Auto Scaling include: Dynamic Scaling, Predictive Scaling, Multi-service Scaling and Health Checks & Replacement.
These features help businesses maintain optimal performance levels while effectively controlling cloud costs.
How can Future Processing help with AWS Cost Optimisation?
Future Processing offers expert AWS FinOps consulting, helping businesses implement cost governance, automate cost optimisation, and maximise cloud efficiency.
Our team specialises in AWS cost reduction strategies, right-sizing, and budgeting solutions to ensure your cloud investments deliver maximum value.
As an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, we leverage funding programs and discounts to pass on savings to clients while offering advanced cloud solutions that keep them competitive.
We are also an AWS Cloud Operations Competency Partner – one of just 9 in Poland and 43 in the world. This status allows us to provide specialised cloud financial management solutions that reduce waste and optimise cloud infrastructure for our clients. We provide expert guidance on AWS cost management, have access to AWS’s Migration Acceleration Program (#MAP), and add value through AWS resale discounts, making us a top choice for both partnership and AWS reselling.
Listen to my conversation with Adam Grabek, as we explain how companies often lose money in the cloud due to inefficient management practices:
Whether you need help with cloud cost assessment, cost allocation, budgeting, or implementing a comprehensive cost management strategy, Future Processing is your trusted partner in navigating the complexities of AWS optimisation.
